The Body - Training and it's Effects

The aim of an effective warm up is to gradually get your whole body prepared for work. This will ensure that you prevent injury to muscles, tendons and ligaments.
Four key stages are involved in an effective warm up. These are:

1. Increase your pulse rate by raising the blood flow to the muscles. This can be achieved through aerobic exercise such as jogging, building up to light running for a few minutes.
After this exercise you should have raised your body temperature and increased joint mobility.

2. Complete stretching exercises for the large muscle groups. Stretching exercises should last a further few minutes.
After this exercise should be supple.

3. Refresh a few specific skill-related practices for the activity you are participating in. For example, if the activity is basketball, practise a few lay up shot for a further few minutes.
After this you should be familiar with some of the performance skills involved in the activity.

4. Prepare your mind for the activity ahead. You might wish to note these down.
After this exercise you should be able to focus on your performance improvement objectives.

Warm Down

The purpose of the warm down (or cool down) is to help your body to recover after exercise and for your heart rate to decrease slowly.

It should start with jogging or light running. This will help the blood circulation to carry more oxygen to the muscles, which in turn will help reduce muscle stiffness as lactic acid is removed more quickly. This exercise should last a few minutes.

Complete your warm down with some stretching. This will help keep muscles supple.

The Body - Training and it's Effects

Principles of Training

For a physical fitness training programme to be effective you need to apply the training principles of specificity and progressive overload to your programme.

This can be achieved by adapting duration, intensity and frequency in your programme.

Why is Specificity Important?

Specificity is the first key principle in training and is crucial for physical fitness improvement.

Specificity involves ensuring that training is specific to your needs, relevant to the activity you are performing in and to your existing levels of fitness and ability.

Why is Progressive Overload Important?

Progressive overload is the second key principle of training and is crucial to physical fitness improvement.

You progressively add to the demands of your physical fitness programme as your training progresses. If you do not progressively overload your training, your training will cease to be useful as it will become too easy.

For example, if you are an athlete training for the 150m, you could set time targets for different parts of your training programme. Once you have achieved these time targets, you could create new time targets to ensure progressive overload is included in your training.

Why is Frequency Important?

Frequency determines how often you train.

For the average performer to improve cardiorespiratory endurance, for example, you would need to exercise…